Given that the KF5 based Kate works OK on Windows, I would like to get the Mac version up and running, too.

As virtualization of MacOS X is kind of “forbidden” and not that nicely usable anyway, as no nice accelerating drivers are available for the standard vm solutions, I just went out into the world and bought some Retina MacBook.

I followed the nice guide on https://github.com/haraldF/homebrew-kf5 (thanks Harald :=) and got some installed Kate/KWrite (after patching kio to skip X11 detection).

But ok, not that usable, at least without any investigation which env vars are missing per default you get a Kate that crashs or just shows the main window central content without any actions/menus/toolbars/sidebars/…

In addition, the application is scaled, as the manifest that tells we are able to handle retina bla stuff is missing.

Guess lots of work ahead, but given I have now some Mac, I will work on that in the following months 😉

P.S. I never had a Mac before and got often told by “Mac Fans” that I should switch to some “real” operating system from my stupid borked unusable cluttered hacky … Linux. Given that the new shiny MacBook directly stalled for ever during the guided “create your user and give us all your data” installation wizard on first boot, I am not that impressed ;=) My mother would have been stuck and after some googling that seems to be a “known issue”, at least for me, after a hard reboot, the thingy worked and I had a login, more luck than others 😛

Here it goes, Kate5 running on Windows:This is an early version of Kate5 on Windows. It runs just fine but has some glitches, such as the white lines between selected text lines, or wrong margins in the search&replace bar, or showing a ‘+1’ in the top right corner, although all documents are visible.

Update: After installing oxygen-icons and switching the font to Consolas (what Visual Studio uses), the glitches above are gone. Here is an updated screenshot:

So essentially it works, and if all goes well, we hope to provide a good text editor experience with Kate5 on Windows in the next year(s). To this end, we are currently discussing having a joint Kate/KDevelop/Windows developer sprint early next year.

After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5 dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!

Kate has a mascot: Kate the Woodpecker

The short design summary (by Tyson Tan):

Why a woodpecker? I said I was going to draw a humming bird, but she turned out to look more like a woodpecker, and the sound a woodpecker makes knocking on a tree is coincidentally similar to the sound of keyboard strokes).

Kate is female because of her name. I thought about other names like Klicky and Katherine, but I would rather save them for other future KDE projects to pick up as their names.

Design elements:
“{}” on the chest, “/” of the feathers, and “*” in the eyes.
The wing feathers also resembles multiple document tabs.
Color scheme inspired by doxygen source code highlighting.

And how does the first version of the mascot look like? Here is the mandatory version 1.0 mascot picture:

Tyson Tan allows that artwork to be Creative Commons BY-SA and/or GPL and/or GFDL licensed and donates it to the KDE Kate project.

This is version 1.0, changes might be made and more variants are possible in the future.

Thanks to Tyson Tan for this contribution, he rocks (more of his artwork can be found on his homepage). We will see the mascot soon a lot more on the Kate homepage and other Kate material.

This once more shows: the community shall never underestimate any non-code contributions. You designers, translators, documentation writers, …., that help us all out, you all rock!